Water and the Commons Imaginary/Comments/Reply

The term "commons" has come to signify a much broader set of meanings than assigned to it by academic scholars. In public discourse, water is often referred to as a commons in situations where it exists as public property under the control of the state or as private property in the form of state-issued water licenses. In recent studies of the "new commons," such as music, the Internet, and policing, the term is used to signify virtually any form of collective interest or public good. In this paper, I argue that the term has come to constitute a kind of social imaginary with powerful political and ethical implications, especially with regard to water management. This has important implications for social scientists who seek to inform public debate on water issues. On the basis of research conducted in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, I argue that the notion of commons-as-social-imaginary maps much more accurately onto observable events than do conventional definitions of commons. I conclude with a discussion of the concept of distributed, multilevel governance, pointing out its congruence with the concept of commons-as-social-imaginary, and I propose a public anthropology research agenda that is reliant on both concepts. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]